Tuesday, May 04, 2004

The racism behind the general American view of the world, and in particular of the Arab world, is so all-pervasive that Americans don't even notice it anymore. Think about this excerpt from an article by Virginia Tilley (and think about it in particular if you ever have the misfortune to read any of the anti-Muslim rantings of Daniel Pipes and his ilk):

"The irony here is that, if these photos had instead portrayed American soldiers abused in some Arab prison, screaming right-wing US media would have waved them as substantiating every racist claim of inherent Arab depravity. On Fox News, ranks of flunky intellectuals would have soberly propounded the social-psychological violence inherent in Muslim theology and the 'Arab mind'; tears of patriotic passion would have celebrated US military might as the golden force opposing the dark ferocity of the savage Arab masses. Feeble liberal protest - that it is wrong to extrapolate from one prison policy to a whole culture - would have been derided and silenced. And high-minded speeches would have emerged from the White House, mustering US patriotic zeal to combat these forces of evil which produced such an outrage. Yet when others launch similar stereotyping distortions of us, we claim the high ground: those ignorant savage Arabs, we sneer, with no conception of our culture. How gullible and backward they are, to fail to grasp the truth and be so enflamed. It must be al-Jazeera's fault."

Given the clear evidence of unspeakable acts of torture, much of its sexualized, committed by many young Christian Americans in Iraq, what is it about Christian America that turns its young men and women into violent sexual sadists? The only possible explanation is that Americans are not fully human, and their crazy inferior religion, with all its erotic depictions of violence against Christ (just ask Mel Gibson), turns them into psycho-sexual savages with peculiar homoerotic compulsions. This sounds like complete crazy-talk, but it is exactly the sort of nonsense I read every day written by distinguished American experts about the Arab and Muslim worlds. How does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot?